Even
after over twenty years the enigma of the Lockerbie Disaster haunts
the planet. The disaster has claimed many victims after the event too.

The
families of the 270 killed still have not got closure as the truth of
what happened to the plane is still hidden. Governments of all political
colors both sides of the Atlantic seem to be unwilling to let the public
in on what they know and have known for decades. Many ask why this silence?
Others seek closure in accepting the script as per Kamp Zeist and the
compensation paid by Libya, not because it accepted any guilt, but rather
to get back into the money club.(Have sanctions removed).

The
desperation for that vital resource Oil has made Libya very popular
in the latest decade. Col Gadaffi is as popular in the corridors of
power in D.C. as Hugo Chavez was unpopular with the Bush administration.
However, we need to explain this enigma by taking apart some vital clues
which are and have been in the public domain, but much of the media
have been too lazy or too disinterested to find. Pan Am 103 was among
the first 747s to roll off the Boeing manufacturing line in Washington
State. It was sold to Pan Am and spent its whole career with that airline.

The first name of this aircraft was Morning Light and it had over a
decade flying around the world as this before in the early eighties
being renamed as Clipper – “Maid of the Seas.”

The
end was abrupt - as we all too tragically know - over the south west
Scotland market town of Lockerbie, whose name got appropriated by the
media, and thus into history as the Lockerbie disaster.

However, before beginning allocating blame we should have looked closely
at the signs of what caused this to happen. Air accident reports are
done so that the same does not happen again. Before PA103 fell from
the skies as we are told it had the year before undergone a thorough
re working to make it ready as a CRAF aircraft (i.e. Civil Reserve Air
Force combat ready aircraft) which cost well over $20 million to refit
the plane adding a considerable amount of weight to the protective hull
and thousands of pounds of weight to the flooring above the cargo deck.
This meant that the outer hull was strengthened and the rear of the
plane practically a solid cocoon. The idea that 340 gramms of Semtex
would even dent this, let alone break the total integrity of the plane
is according to one of the explosive experts I talked to, highly improbable.

The extra weight would translate to extra fuel costs and that is why
Government subsidize such aircraft so that they are kept flying. Indeed,
it is somewhat ironic that in the first “Gulf War, PA103 - Maid
of the Seas -would have been the first into service, had it survived.

The
first time you read the official reports you tend to accept them without
question after all they are prepared for government. If anyone was to
alter or omit something vital in such a report it would be next thing
to treason. We are on the whole very trusting of such documents. Secondly
few of us are trained enough in the science or even grounded enough
in physics to question what on the surface appears ok.

I
am no scientist, but it was a spelling error which put me on the more
questioning phase. When I experimented in looking at a map and tracking
the described demise of the aircraft it was the report which began to
fall apart. A lexicographer later highlighted the spelling error was
no error but the way a foreign national might spell that word. A national
from Iraq, or the middle east - surprisingly. The word by the way was
Taxi spelled Taxy!

There
was another absolutely glaring error which related to ordinance survey
material. A six figure references takes you very close to an object
and in two cases references were given and the suggestion of 500 meters
and 300 meters was given as the closeness to this object. In reality
it would be a tenth of that.

Now such a qualified scientist as an air accident investigator would
not make that mistake and it was no typo as by the time such a report
is printed and published it is scrutinized and corrected many times
over. After all the lives of people are at stake, in the future at least,
in such reports and it is very qualified people who need to study them.

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There
are other strange anomalies such as where the plane was when it came
down we are told 31000 feet, yet the debris trail belies both the direction
of the flight and the speed. How did the cockpit land at Tundergarth
if it was crossing the Solway Firth when it broke up?

I have tracked down two people who saw it crash to the ground like a
spinning top. Indeed the Cockpit is full of strange questions. Why were
there four bodies (one armed with a handgun) in the cockpit? (there
are only three crew.)

Why does the Fire master report point out that it was nearly two hours
after the first call at 7.04pm to the fire brigade, that he dispatched
someone to Tundergarth to see if fire tenders were required. Yet one
journalist at Tundergarth very early saw a fire tender there (more than
likely from Longtown military base). The journalist had to be driven
to Lockerbie by a local Doctor, as the area had been cordoned off. The
doctor was on scene early, prior to the police deployment. The description
of what landed at Tundergarth by the firemaster’s senior man is
worth looking at in relation to the accident report photos. His description
is in the Firemasters official report.

It
suggests that that it landed “…landed nearly intact from
the cockpit to the spiral staircase section leading to the upper clipper
class section. That suggests that at least two or three of the upper
windows section would be there yet on Dec 22 1988 a photo from another
angle shows a truncated cockpit with the first class section but little
of the upper section.

Why
arc lights were sent up there why were CIA and Mossad (Israeli Secret
service) there nosing for material to take away. Did they work all night?
Was a survivor or two removed? Even a well oiled (with a good malt whisky)
FBI man has confirmed to a police man as much many decades later.

There could have been survivors a scientific article written by a former
president of the North American Medical Examiners Dr. William Eckhart
of Wichita University, said as much on his reconnaissance of the scene
a few months after the event in 1989. Scottish police unsuccessfully
tried to have his article stopped from being published in an American
Scientific Journal. What were they afraid of in this article revealing?

A
much later investigation found one source who stated that although an
unproven piece of information suggested a CIA person on the plane linked
to the BCCI investigation had been spirited away (alive!). Who knows
someone carries this secret maybe even to the grave.

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If
it were an accident, then cargo doors may have played a role, but only
partially. Indeed from reading other air accident reports both sides
of the ‘pond’ it could have played a role, but only a partial
one. Secondly these reports tend to suggest that ‘Debris trails’
give a clue to what the cause of the plane's demise. Large trails tend
to suggest explosives and very large ones Lockerbie has been suggested
to be at least 800 square miles at most but well over 15 miles possibly
military standard explosives, while narrow and short trails can be mechanical
failure in origin.

So as you see there are more questions raised by the report than are
answered. Also the photographs betray things too. One so glaringly bad
even a child could detect the material shown is from a different aircraft.
I personally tested a 7 year old and she spotted it saying that's different
from that pointing to the area which was supposedly highlighted in the
enlarged section. Later in the report in the diagrams, why use an example
from Air India crash which happened over three years earlier?

The suggested line of descent too is off when you discover, by questioning
people who worked on the scene, other interesting information to the
contrary.

Although officially never confirmed, one soldier who worked in the crater
area was puzzled that the fields before the crater were a couple of
inches thick in Kerosene fuel and why it was sucked up by an unmarked
military truck and when he noticed it happening he was approached and
told by a senior man never to talk of this! Why not! Would it destroy
the myth that Sherwood crescent was destroyed by the air fuel? If not
air fuel what?

Another explosives engineer who was among the volunteers on the first
couple of days was in the crater and was puzzled that there was no real
smell of burnt fuel!

There
were also in the crater few pieces of metal larger than 6-8 feet long.
There were gruesome finds of body parts sadly but little else. Bombs
and fuel explosions don't make craters but missiles do! Could there
have been smuggled on board munitions set is such a way as to destroy
the plane?

Some
are convinced of this. However, as we are dealing with this plane, we
should point out that a logical reason for the seats being freed up
at the last minute had nothing to do with a massive conspiracy. Rather
I was told from a reliable source in Pan Am that the flight would have
been piloted by a different person had he not been ill. He was due to
retire soon and as was the custom he had been gifted a third of the
seats for his family and friends. Because the crew was changed those
seats became free. This matches with the fact that the Syracuse Students
were able to get several seats and that Flora Swire (Jim Swire’s
Daughter) was able to get a last minute booking to meet her boyfriend
in New York. Earlier she had tried to book that flight and was told
it was full.

Perhaps
the only diplomat who got a warning something was up, was Pik Botha
whose BOSS (secret service with close ties to Mossad) entourage changed
his booking from Frankfurt via PA 103 to a direct Lufthansa plane, if
I remember the conversation right.

There are still those who feel that the integrity of PA103 may have
been compromised. They may feel that caused the crash, but even if it
played a role the debris trail tells another story, too long for this
article. The ground zero (i.e. where the crash happened) evidence was
tampered with by many some things were taken away and replaced. Some
police even approached their MP’s about this crime. Others merely
kept quiet out of fear for their pensions! Off the record I have so
much more I can never say, but Libya or Abdel Baset al Megrahi, was
never remotely in the frame for this one unless you call Margaret Thatcher
a Liar! In her autobiography she underlined allowing the use of U.K.
bases for the attacks on Tripoli and Benghazi stopped Libya being a
source of terrorism. That took place in 1986 so why did she go with
Bush in blaming Libya in 1991 for the PA103 attack? Why in her autobiography
years after this is Lockerbie nearly omitted? It was given only a very
small mention.

The largest terrorist attack in the history of U.K. terrorism following
no less than 30 years against the IRA and under her watch should have
warranted at least a chapter.

Why
did Margaret Thatcher then Prime Minister stop Coleman Churchill, head
of counter terrorism in the U.K. from being lead investigator? Instead,
she insisted that the Scottish Police carry out the investigation and
this at a time well before any devolution. Jurisdiction could not have
been a problem. Indeed 32 countries could have taken up an investigation
and Germany did their BKA had busted the PFLP-GC cell in Neuss near
Frankfurt a couple of months before. However, they did not proceed with
a case against Megrahi and cohort as they said to me in a telephone
interview there was insufficient evidence.

So
from just looking at the Crash site of the Plane we gather much that
has not seen the light of day in the Court at Kamp Van Zeist.

In
the next feature I will look at the people around this enigma which
has brought shame on the Scottish Justice system which only recently
showed proper compassion to a terminally ill man they wrongly convicted.

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The
day of the judgment I wrote a story from Zurich about tainted evidence.
The so called fragment of timer. Only the Edinburgh Evening Times published
that story. Despite its devastating claim – that the fragment
of timer was a prototype and therefore could not have set off a bomb!
In other words it was fake! None of the media followed up this at all.
For part two click below.

Stewart Nicol has worked in Journalism for over twenty years, primarily
in the freelance field. Stewart has been a member of the Chartered Institute
of Journalists since 1976. He covered the Royal Deeside area for the regional
newspaper The Press & Journal for a decade. For some of that time
I had a small column in the Evening Express their other title. Following
that, Stewart covered the North Sea Oil industry which led to his pursuit
of deeper investigative journalism. He's also spent a number of years
covering the Church of Scotland and the Church of England for specialist
publications.

Stewart has been on a sabbatical of sorts child minding and being a house
husband as well as writing a book for St. Andrew Press on Saints. Currently
he is working on a Lockerbie book. Stewart lives in the West of Scotland
and has a Theology degree.